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Anil Dash's article discusses how the internet has enabled and encouraged the formation of what he calls "Fake Markets." These Fake Markets have the appearance of a more ordinary free market, but the choices allowed therein are either illusory or can be arbitrarily shuffled or removed without knowledge of any of the parties to the transaction. He traces the changes in business plans of companies such as Uber, Google, and eBay to show how they have evolved from creating new markets to strangling them.
But unlike competitive sellers on eBay, Uber drivers can't set their prices. In fact, prices can be (and regularly have been) changed unilaterally by Uber. And passengers can't make informed choices about selecting a driver: The algorithm by which a passenger and driver are matched is opaque—to both the passenger and driver. In fact, as Data & Society's research has shown, Uber has at times deliberately misrepresented the market of available cars by showing "ghost" cars to users in the Uber app.
It seems this "market" has some awfully weird traits.
- Consumers can't trust the information they're being provided to make a purchasing decision.
- A single opaque algorithm defines which buyers are matched with which sellers.
- Sellers have no control over their own pricing or profit margins.
- Regulators see the genuine short-term consumer benefit but don't realize the long-term harms that can arise.
This is, by any reasonable definition, no market at all. One might even call Uber a "Fake Market". Yet, by carefully describing drivers in their system as "entrepreneurs" and appropriating the language of true markets, Uber has been welcomed by communities and policymakers as if they were creating a new marketplace. That has serious implications for policy, regulation and even civil rights. For example, we can sincerely laud Uber for making it easier for African American passengers to reliably hail a car when they need a ride, but if persistent patterns of bias from drivers arise again in the Uber era, we'll have a harder time regulating those abuses because Uber doesn't usually follow the same policies as licensed taxis.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Grishnakh on Monday February 27 2017, @03:25PM (1 child)
Since this article mentions Ebay, I'd like to give them some free advertising. These days, I've found Ebay to be really invaluable in finding all kinds of stuff, both used stuff and cheap stuff, including cheap junk from China. I do wish there was more competition for them (because competition is almost always a good thing), and their fees were lower; unfortunately that's what we get with one big company dominating a sector like that. But Ebay does have some competition: Amazon. And these days, Amazon has really gone down the shitter, so Ebay looks great (to me at least) in comparison. One big example: cheap Chinese junk. If you want to buy something cheap, you can get it *really* cheap sent directly from China, and it's usually cheaper on Ebay when you do. But what if you would rather buy from a US seller and not wait 4 weeks? On Ebay, this is easy: the location of the seller is made plainly obvious. And you can even filter search results by the seller's location. Eliminating the Chinese sellers is as easy as clicking "US only" or "North America only". You can even filter results by distance from you, so if you only want to see sellers located with 100 miles, you can do that. Amazon doesn't let you do any of this, and makes it somewhat difficult to see where a seller is located; the best you can do is add the product to your cart, go through checkout, and see how long it thinks it'll take to arrive. I used to buy a bunch of stuff on Amazon, but these days I've almost entirely given up on it.
Anyway, enough of my ramblings about Ebay. I also want to address this:
For example, we can sincerely laud Uber for making it easier for African American passengers to reliably hail a car when they need a ride, but if persistent patterns of bias from drivers arise again in the Uber era, we'll have a harder time regulating those abuses because Uber doesn't usually follow the same policies as licensed taxis.
I don't see the logic here. Uber is lauded for making it easier for black people to get a ride, but then they claim that if drivers start exhibiting bias (like the cab drivers are infamous for), that it'll be hard to regulate this. Why is this? Because Uber isn't subject to the regulation that cabs are? This is non-sequitur. Cabs *are* subject to regulation, and that regulation includes rules that they're not allowed to discriminate against black people (or anyone). Yet, cab drivers do this *all the time*. Clearly, the regulation is absolutely worthless. Anti-Uber people consistently bring up "regulation" as one of the plusses of cabs, and that sounds great in theory, but in practice it's worthless, as black people in NYC will happily tell you. What's the point of regulation if it's never enforced? It's just a feel-good measure that gives people a false sense of security and a false idea that the local government is working for them, when it is not. It's better to have no regulation at all than to have regulation that's never enforced.
(Score: 3, Informative) by c0lo on Monday February 27 2017, @09:38PM
Almost there. When aliexpress.com [aliexpress.com] will be more accessible to non-chinese vendors... and they started [gizmodo.com.au].
I'm always double-checking the prices between ebay and aliexpress, sometimes I found the same stuff cheaper on aliexpress, sometimes on ebay.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford